Hey again, I got around to making my video. So much for a "quick-flythrough".
I got off on a tangent making different post-process effects and whatnot. On that note, thanks to Vailias for all the useful UDK-related posts he's made on here.
Anyway the video is only about a minute, but I hope you enjoy it.
[vv]58028298[/vv]
For some reason I became really fixated on making the clock actually work, so the numbers tick and sync up with the bars. It took me way too long to figure it out, but it does in fact work.
Here's a look at the material setup. I'm sure there's a better way, but maybe someone will figure out something useful to do with it.
And here's one last set of screenshots. Thanks to everyone again for the feedback, it definitely made me work harder. On to the next thing.
Just have to say I love this work so much! You don't see a lot of things on this forum that are done in this clean, modern style. It takes a lot of great material knowledge to really pull it off like you have. I am especially stunned by your interior design and industrial design skills!
Very, very nice work. The scale of everything works together and the lighting seems like something out of a arch-viz piece promoting said office design. Well done.
I love the computer rooms, they are so clear and consistent. I also love how you made that clock functional if anything that's my favorite part. Also +1 for doing something that's clean not saying that grunge and stuff is bad/overused but for the most part people don't touch clean stuff too much
SaferDan - I thought about taking the "lived-in" aspect further with wear/dirt decals, but I eventually settled for something closer to a promotional-shoot look.
MartinH - Cool, glad to hear it!
ZacD - Fair point. Also, in the video the motion-blurs clearly clip through objects a couple times. Juuust enough to really annoy me, so I understamd your feeling.
Perlinfalcon - Thanks! I think grunge just leads to better eye-candy for real-time stuff at the moment, plus it's more believable. I think there was a thread about this in General Discussion recently.
mbischof - I find it to be true that you have to exaggerate the scale of things slightly in games or else they seem tiny. Lots of the props were scaled up 25% after I tried using realistic dimensions and it didn't look right.
BTolputt - I appreciate the kind words, thanks.
maximumsproductions - Haha, I'm glad someone liked the clock. Getting it to work was like some sort of brain-teaser where I couldn't rest until I figured it out. If I were more technical, I wouldn't have spent so long on it.
erik! - hey thanks!
Hey again, I wanted to bump the thread with a short self-assessment. I think it takes a while before you can look at your own work with any kind of detachment, but since the problems are still on my mind I wanted to lay it out there.
Good
- Stayed pretty close to the original BSP block-out.
- Was able to define most of the layout with modular pieces.
- Took advantage of material instancing for tweaking.
- Documented progress with screenshots (see: animated gifs on page 2).
- Was able to reuse base textures across multiple materials.
- Added a bit of animation for the video so things seem less static.
- Achieved the overall "mood" originally envisioned.
Bad
- Should have bumped the thread with updates more often (!!!).
- Made a couple props that didn't respect the grid early on, leading to gaps and wonky-scaling.
- Didn't nail down a list of required materials, so time was wasted developing materials I didn't use.
- Spent a lot of time searching for a satisfactory lighting style and honing the overall color palette
- Spent much more time designing some of the props rather than creating them.
- Some of the interiors are a bit too boxy.
- Lighting seams in a couple areas of visual interest.
- Could have broken up some of the texture tiling more.
I could have knocked out a few of these problems with a stronger concept early on. Need to brush up on those concept art skills.
You should re-think some of your camera choices. Putting three right-spinning cameras back to back to back can make the end user dizzy. Generally for architecture animations, even if your camera is static you want to add at least a little zoom in/out to it to help give motion and life to your scene.
I can only wonder... how the concrete column on an upper floor walkway is all by itself
Near the end of the video on the left of the screen.
Other than that I can't find any fault, just a couple of disagreements not worth pointing out.
HuzZz - I was gonna let the thread die, but since you asked: Here's all the clock assets, saved from the July 2012 UDK. Now you can see how lazy the model is for yourself.
VelvetElvis - The spinning shots might have been less disorienting with a higher FOV and a slower rotation speed. I'll keep your advice in mind for future videos.
King Mango - There's more than one column on each level, but maybe it just looks that way in the video. I'm sure an architect or engineer would scold me for the floor plan.
By the way, being featured on the forum banner was a really nice surprise. Definitely motivation for the next environment. Hope to have a thread up soon.
Awesome work. I'd like to see a texture breakdown of how you did your decals. Did you put them all on one sheet or did you create different textures for each part i.e. straight, curve, arrow, etc.?
I really dig the plants-on-a-wall element (maybe elaborate on some more plant variations) as well as the interior props you've modeled so far (chair, surv.-cam, etc.) and that procedural looking architecture in the lobby. How did you make that?
The lighting feels a little flat though - about to change
great progress on lighting, elevators and lobby both looking awesome!
I agree with Quickel: blue-ish shadow tint would be nice, I guess skylight should be the way to do it while keeping other lights intact, not sure though ... easier said than done, maybe subtle postprocess is faster way.
(btw haven't they used 3rd party software to bake lightmaps in Mirrors Edge?)
SeveredSon - Yeah, I used a texture for the corners and the labels. For the straight parts, I didn't use a texture so I just typed in a width for the decal actor.
At first I tried to put unique textures into each RGB channel, but I found that if the textures overlap across channels then it can cause some bad compression artifacts. So if I had overlapping textures, I would just separate them into RGB and the Alpha channel.
Here's a look at the translucent decal material:
Polynaught - Well, you're gonna be disappointed with future updates since I'm not working on it anymore. Some of your suggestions came up earlier in the thread, and I agree that the lighting is/was a weak point overall.
If you were asking about the triangular piece with the windows, I just pushed and pulled some vertices around until I found a shape I liked. The metal frame is a separate piece. To make the frame, I chamfered the edges and extruded the resulting quads after some clean-up. The hardest part was making the UVs, really.
Once I brought it into Unreal, I scaled up its profile to exaggerate it a bit and try to make it look like it's watching/peering over the lobby area.
GailG - Yeah, maybe there's too much activity for believability, but what the hell, whatever looks cool.
great progress on lighting, elevators and lobby both looking awesome!
I agree with Quickel: blue-ish shadow tint would be nice, I guess skylight should be the way to do it while keeping other lights intact, not sure though ... easier said than done, maybe subtle postprocess is faster way.
(btw haven't they used 3rd party software to bake lightmaps in Mirrors Edge?)
As they say, art is never finished, only abandoned. But yeah, I switched the dominant light for a moveable dominant light so I could animate it and the lighting was not as nice.
Also, I believe Beast was the lighting editor for ME. Don't know much about it, myself.
as for post process solution: for those of you who prefer photoshop adjustment layers, this is an fast and easy way of taking your color adjustment from PS into UDK using lookup tables.
Very impressive! Large scale environments can be very daunting. I would love to see where you started with materials, I'm still getting used the UDK material nodes, if you have any references you've learned from and like to share that would be awesome!
Kinda reminds me of some of my favourite Goldeneye levels, although this would be one hell of a level if it was in Goldeneye, really great stuff. I just want to shoot the chairs and watch them explode.
I love this. Reminds me of a car dealership on the ground floor for some reason. Some high end company like BMW. Imagine a bright orange 1 series parked in the main lobby area Loving your work. Inspirational.
Hey again, I got around to making my video. So much for a "quick-flythrough".
I got off on a tangent making different post-process effects and whatnot. On that note, thanks to Vailias for all the useful UDK-related posts he's made on here.
Anyway the video is only about a minute, but I hope you enjoy it.
[vv]58028298[/vv]
For some reason I became really fixated on making the clock actually work, so the numbers tick and sync up with the bars. It took me way too long to figure it out, but it does in fact work.
Here's a look at the material setup. I'm sure there's a better way, but maybe someone will figure out something useful to do with it.
And here's one last set of screenshots. Thanks to everyone again for the feedback, it definitely made me work harder. On to the next thing.
Really great work. Like t a lot. Thank you for sharing. :thumbup:
Replies
Hey again, I got around to making my video. So much for a "quick-flythrough".
I got off on a tangent making different post-process effects and whatnot. On that note, thanks to Vailias for all the useful UDK-related posts he's made on here.
Anyway the video is only about a minute, but I hope you enjoy it.
[vv]58028298[/vv]
For some reason I became really fixated on making the clock actually work, so the numbers tick and sync up with the bars. It took me way too long to figure it out, but it does in fact work.
Here's a look at the material setup. I'm sure there's a better way, but maybe someone will figure out something useful to do with it.
And here's one last set of screenshots. Thanks to everyone again for the feedback, it definitely made me work harder. On to the next thing.
Also I really love your set dressing. In that fourth shot that office still feels clean but lived in! Great work!
MartinH - Cool, glad to hear it!
ZacD - Fair point. Also, in the video the motion-blurs clearly clip through objects a couple times. Juuust enough to really annoy me, so I understamd your feeling.
Perlinfalcon - Thanks! I think grunge just leads to better eye-candy for real-time stuff at the moment, plus it's more believable. I think there was a thread about this in General Discussion recently.
mbischof - I find it to be true that you have to exaggerate the scale of things slightly in games or else they seem tiny. Lots of the props were scaled up 25% after I tried using realistic dimensions and it didn't look right.
BTolputt - I appreciate the kind words, thanks.
maximumsproductions - Haha, I'm glad someone liked the clock. Getting it to work was like some sort of brain-teaser where I couldn't rest until I figured it out. If I were more technical, I wouldn't have spent so long on it.
erik! - hey thanks!
Hey again, I wanted to bump the thread with a short self-assessment. I think it takes a while before you can look at your own work with any kind of detachment, but since the problems are still on my mind I wanted to lay it out there.
Good
- Stayed pretty close to the original BSP block-out.
- Was able to define most of the layout with modular pieces.
- Took advantage of material instancing for tweaking.
- Documented progress with screenshots (see: animated gifs on page 2).
- Was able to reuse base textures across multiple materials.
- Added a bit of animation for the video so things seem less static.
- Achieved the overall "mood" originally envisioned.
Bad
- Should have bumped the thread with updates more often (!!!).
- Made a couple props that didn't respect the grid early on, leading to gaps and wonky-scaling.
- Didn't nail down a list of required materials, so time was wasted developing materials I didn't use.
- Spent a lot of time searching for a satisfactory lighting style and honing the overall color palette
- Spent much more time designing some of the props rather than creating them.
- Some of the interiors are a bit too boxy.
- Lighting seams in a couple areas of visual interest.
- Could have broken up some of the texture tiling more.
I could have knocked out a few of these problems with a stronger concept early on. Need to brush up on those concept art skills.
Near the end of the video on the left of the screen.
Other than that I can't find any fault, just a couple of disagreements not worth pointing out.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1zkhchtm4ajmnsc/JDVI_UDK_Radial_Clock.rar
dudealan2001 - Thank you
VelvetElvis - The spinning shots might have been less disorienting with a higher FOV and a slower rotation speed. I'll keep your advice in mind for future videos.
King Mango - There's more than one column on each level, but maybe it just looks that way in the video. I'm sure an architect or engineer would scold me for the floor plan.
By the way, being featured on the forum banner was a really nice surprise. Definitely motivation for the next environment. Hope to have a thread up soon.
The lighting feels a little flat though - about to change
I agree with Quickel: blue-ish shadow tint would be nice, I guess skylight should be the way to do it while keeping other lights intact, not sure though ... easier said than done, maybe subtle postprocess is faster way.
(btw haven't they used 3rd party software to bake lightmaps in Mirrors Edge?)
SeveredSon - Yeah, I used a texture for the corners and the labels. For the straight parts, I didn't use a texture so I just typed in a width for the decal actor.
At first I tried to put unique textures into each RGB channel, but I found that if the textures overlap across channels then it can cause some bad compression artifacts. So if I had overlapping textures, I would just separate them into RGB and the Alpha channel.
Here's a look at the translucent decal material:
Polynaught - Well, you're gonna be disappointed with future updates since I'm not working on it anymore.
If you were asking about the triangular piece with the windows, I just pushed and pulled some vertices around until I found a shape I liked. The metal frame is a separate piece. To make the frame, I chamfered the edges and extruded the resulting quads after some clean-up. The hardest part was making the UVs, really.
Once I brought it into Unreal, I scaled up its profile to exaggerate it a bit and try to make it look like it's watching/peering over the lobby area.
GailG - Yeah, maybe there's too much activity for believability, but what the hell, whatever looks cool.
As they say, art is never finished, only abandoned. But yeah, I switched the dominant light for a moveable dominant light so I could animate it and the lighting was not as nice.
Also, I believe Beast was the lighting editor for ME. Don't know much about it, myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g6kyZ7kRPs&feature=player_embedded
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorGrading.html
It might be helpful in scenes similar to this awesome one, pushing mid tones/shadows colors right where you want it.
thank you
but looks little artificial.............
especially "overlook5.jpg" looks really great!
I have been thinking of creating something similar for a while now too, since I am more comfortable working with clean and polished stuff.